Video: Exploding battery demonstration

We’ve been hearing news of laptops bursting into flames for several months now. Well, someone has taken it upon themselves to make a video of such fire-making in action. Now, there is a bit of a caveat to keep in mind as you view the five-minute (or so) vid below: this notebook is not one of the recalled units, and the combustion wasn’t exactly spontaneous. PC Pitstop put the lithium-ion battery into an unstable state (Gizmodo says this is “the same state that usually occurred with the Sony laptop battery explosions”), but from there, the chain of events occurred on its own.

Most laptop batteries contain several cells of juice, and if you watch the video, you can watch them all go off in succession, starting with a mild spark and smoke, and quickly escalating in temperature to a full-out blaze, filling the room with toxic fumes. In fact, the fire — at one point — spreads out as much as six feet. Moreover, the fire is not only electrical, not only chemical, but “metal” as well, with temperatures exceeding 1000 degrees.